D-Day remembered: A healer goes to war

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Dr. Arnold Burden stands in his Springhill home in March. Dr. Burden joined the army while underrage using a false birth certificate and ended up assigned to a medical unit for the duration of the Second World War.(CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

Dr. Arnold Burden stands in his Springhill home in March. Dr. Burden joined the army while underrage using a false birth certificate and ended up assigned to a medical unit for the duration of the Second World War.(CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

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Dr. Arnold Burden sits in his Springhill home in March. Dr. Burden joined the army while underrage using a false birth certificate and ended up assigned to a medical unit for the duration of Second World War. In 1956 and 1958, he was part of the rescue operations during two seperate coal mining disasters in Springhill. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

Dr. Arnold Burden sits in his Springhill home in March. Dr. Burden joined the army while underrage using a false birth certificate and ended up assigned to a medical unit for the duration of Second World War. In 1956 and 1958, he was part of the rescue operations during two seperate coal mining disasters in Springhill. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

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Dr. Arnold Burden handles some of his medals in his Springhill home in March.. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

Dr. Arnold Burden handles some of his medals in his Springhill home in March.. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

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Dr. Arnold Burden handles his Order of Nova Scotia pendant in his Springhill home in March. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

Dr. Arnold Burden handles his Order of Nova Scotia pendant in his Springhill home in March. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

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Dr. Arnold Burden points to an image of the unit he was posted to during the Second World War immediately before shipping back to Canada. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

Dr. Arnold Burden points to an image of the unit he was posted to during the Second World War immediately before shipping back to Canada. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

He performed his first surgery at 14, while rabbit hunting with a friend.

A pellet from his gun ricocheted off a rock and lodged into the other boy’s leg and knee. So Dr. Arnold Burden did what he would do for most of his life, in war and peace and disaster: thought quickly and got busy.

“I heated my hunting knife with a match and took the one out by his knee,” he recalls almost 80 year later.

He wasn’t a doctor then, that day in the woods.

Or a war veteran, approaching the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Normandy, where he barely escaped death and went on to witness the hallowed, hungry faces of concentration camp survivors. Or a rescuer — twice — of men trapped in mines.

But people who know him say he’s carried this innate altruism with him throughout his life.

Glimpses of it are visible today in the war service medals crossing his legion uniform.

And the awards lining his walls. The Order of Nova Scotia. Rotary club and medical society honours. The Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award for “outstanding and selfless contribution” to his community and his country.

“I figure I would be the same as anybody else if they were in that situation. I just happened to be in that situation.”

The 92-year-old retired physician has been in many situations, over many decades. Extraordinary situations when — others say —

he did more than most, risking his life for his country and his community.

“He wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if he hadn’t,” says Helen, his wife of 65 years, recalling his unhesitating and dangerous journeys underground after the deadly Springhill mine disasters of 1956 and 1958.

“He’s a real hero,” says Ken Melanson, one of the trapped miners he helped save.

“A real nice fellow,” says longtime friend John Mitchell, who met the diminutive self-deprecating doctor when he was saving other lives, at other times, in Springhill.

But as the man his wife calls “just a good person” thinks back over his Second World War and disaster service, as well as his community service and medical service, he tells the tales with little fanfare and fuss.

“If you’re busy, you’re busy,” he says of the risks. “You don’t think of these things.”

‘He worked for everything he had’

“I think he was always that way,” says Mitchell, who first met the doctor in the 1970s when he worked as an emergency medical technician for a Cumberland County ambulance service. They’ve hunted and fished and chatted often since. And he figures Burden’s a man who’d help just about anybody with just about anything.

“I talked to older people years ago (about him) and it seemed like he grew up that way right from the family, right from Day 1. Times weren’t that good in those years, and they had to do what they had to do to get a bite to eat and so on

“I remember he told me about picking blueberries down in West Brook for one cent a box back in the ’30s. Yes, he knew hard times. He wasn’t brought up on a golden stick, I’ll tell ya. He worked for everything he got and everything he had, worked hard.”

Once he worked three jobs at a time, Burden recalls, sitting in his home of 57 years, his own landscape watercolours, fading medical corps armband and army-issued Bible close by.

As a teenager, he sold Rawleigh ointments and salves door-to-door. And worked in a men’s clothing store and a grocery store.

When war broke out in 1939, he wanted to follow in his widowed father’s footsteps. The man who’d raised him and his sister after their mother died when he was four. The man who’d been a First World War veteran and president of his local legion and top-notch baseball player until he lost an eye in the machine shop at the mines.

Burden worked a little in the mines too during summers off from medical school. But first — just 17, weighing just 110 pounds and hearing the Royal Canadian Medical Corps was recruiting — he signed up for war.

He went to Aldershot Military Hospital in January of 1941 and became a medical orderly, sweeping, scrubbing and waxing floors and learning how to make hos-pital beds. Eventually, he learned the No. 7 Canadian General Hospital in Debert needed a trained clerk for its unit overseas.

Burden had taken bookkeeping, shorthand and typing. After forging a medical officer’s signature so he’d quickly pass medical muster, he shipped out to England in November 1941.

That is where he first saw the casualties of war — civilians who’d lost limbs and suffered gaping shrapnel wounds or died from the relentless bombing of the Nazi blitz.

London had the most injuries and deaths. But bombs dropped in smaller communities too. Burden’s field hospital was stationed with the Canadian army in the south of England, between Birmingham and Coventry, where he admitted a steady stream of injured after the nightly bombing raids killed or maimed civilians.

But that’s just a fraction of what came later, when his unit became the first mobile tented hospital to set up in France after the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion that sent Allied soldiers to the beaches of Normandy and on into Nazi-occupied France.

“Four of us on admission were handling 450 to 500 battle casualties a day, every day…” he says of those days in July 1944. “There was all kinds of injuries, people being shot and then there was bomb blasts and even falling out of a truck.

“The worst type of injury was usually chest injuries or head, of course, either shrapnel or a blast.

“The whole hospital was in tents — operating rooms as well as all the wards, X-rays, everything — was all under canvas.”

Bombs dropped precariously close to the canvas time and time again.

Many close calls

Burden had many close calls but dismisses them today as just part of the job — the same calm and steady hand that served his friend so well in the woods and Melanson, underground, years later.

But in the war years, danger came from above — bombs that could take a man out in an ear-shattering second or, at the very least, knock him right off his feet.

“Nothing hit the hospital direct,” Burden remembers.

“But when we moved up to Belgium, a V-1 rocket with one ton of high explosives in the nose cone must have been hit by anti-aircraft fire because it blew up overhead and blew me into the ground.

“And then I was in a couple more major explosions of V-2 rockets. One hits just outside the building that I was in right beside a leave truck with Canadian soldiers coming back from leave, and I was on alone on admissions that night and I had 40-some casualties and four dead. I didn’t even have enough stretchers to lay them on. I was just laying them on the floor until I got them sorted out, triaged and then sent to the wards where they were supposed to be.”

That first rocket, the one hit by anti-aircraft fire, landed on the grounds of an actual hospital building in Belgium, where the medical corps and Burden were then stationed. He was out in the yard when he looked up and saw the jet-propelled rocket that looked like “a big long tube with wings.”

“When it hit, one ton of high explosives, one heck of a big noise,” he says, figuring that and subsequent blasts permanently damaged his hearing.

“It hit to the ground, knocked me off (my feet). … I was just thinking ‘Thank God it didn’t hit the hospital’ because if it hit the hospital, we had 300 or 400 patients plus a couple hundred medical staff that (would have been) hit.”

Then came the V-2 rockets, stealth-like but also deadly.

“Now those things… they go 80 miles up in the air and then come back down so you never hear them until they explode.”

One exploded into that leave truck in Belgium. And another almost into him.

“I was sleeping out in the fields,” he recalls.

“We weren’t in a building … and one of the V-2 rockets lit just a few yards away from where we were but he hit by a pond, soft mud, so it buried down and coned up over us so the blast wave was over us but the sound wave was direct. … Heck of a lot of noise.”

By that time, the war had ended and Burden had headed back home, tucking away the worst memories for awhile.

Memories of the camps

“They were everything you could imagine, practically every disease,” he says of the most horrific sights he saw — Sandbostel concentration camp survivors, liberated in Germany by the Allied forces and carried to his field hospital.

“They were half starved to death. … The Germans practically starved them to death.

“If you gave them a cigarette, they ate it. We had to look after the garbage cans because otherwise they would be into the garbage.

“If you looked in their face, their eyes were dead and they wore these striped like pyjama things, wooden shoes with grass in them instead of socks and these hats. It made us (not) like the Germans any better.”

But he left it behind.

And as he studied to become a doctor at Dalhousie Medical School and as started practising medicine in Prince Edward Island, Melanson went underground.

He and the doctor eventually met there, in the darkened recesses of the Earth after the explosion of Nov. 1, 1956, that killed 39 and trapped 88.

“The first name that was given as being killed was my next-door neighbour, who was two weeks older than I was,” recalls the doctor of hearing the news in P.E.I.

“So I just packed up and was on the boat for the next morning. … These were my friends. These are people I worked with before and lived with.”

He was one of the real heroes, says Melanson of the man who not only helped save him in 1956 but went down again for 33 hours to help other miners after the bump of Oct. 23, 1958, when the Earth shifted and the mine collapsed, killing more than 70 and trapping 100.

His wife Helen, playing bridge at a neighbour’s house, heard the seismic bang and said, “Well, I bet you Arnold will be out there to see what he can do.”

Springhill disaster

As his friend Mitchell puts it, the good doctor “stuck his neck out and risked his life to go down in there” once again.

In 1956, Melanson was sure his life was over, until he saw draegermen and the little doctor with the oxygen masks coming toward him in the dark.

Three days earlier, he’d left his home with his lunch can, walked down Main Street and chatted with two of his friends, who died that afternoon when coal cars in the No. 4 colliery came loose and cut a huge electric cable, sending thousands of volts through the mine and a ball of flame right up the slopes to the surface, killing people above and below.

“I was way down below the explosion,” the 78-year-old Valley Road, Cumberland County, resident recalls.

“The mine filled full of gas and you could smell the smoke. … The only thing that kept us alive was compressed air. On the surface there was a huge compressor they used to put air through, a six-inch pipe down the mine to run machinery, and we got into this here barricade between two doors. And Conrad Embree, he was an older man and a very, very knowledgeable older man, he understood that if we didn’t do something we’d all be dead from the gas because it was getting heavier. So they hooked up a two-inch air hose on the compressor pipe and opened up the valves and we all cut a notch in it, we breathed through that.”

They breathed through that flexible hose every five or 10 minutes, off and on for three days. But as time ticked by, Melanson found it harder and harder to hang onto hope.

“It was terrible,” says the former miner, then hunched in that part of the colliery with more than 40 others, several unconscious, some dead nearby.

“It was terrible, we had no word whatsoever, couldn’t get any word to the surface … scared, I didn’t think we was going to get out at all. There was water running down the mine and it was a white colour, which meant that they had put up a stop and sealed us off to try to put the fire out, cut the oxygen off it, so … Saturday night it looked terrible; Sunday I thought that’s the end of us.

“Nine o’clock Sunday night we heard a rap at this door. … We opened up the door and there was two draegermen came in and said ‘We broke through, don’t move anybody, there’s help on the way,’ and I’d say probably three hours later, two hours later, Dr. Burden entered the mine with the rescue crews. They give us all oxygen and a sandwich.”

“Dr. Burden, he’s a real hero,” he says again, stressing the imminent danger the doctor — who had come down barefaced — draegermen and other rescuers faced, and how close he had come to death.

“It was like … waiting to get hung or something and getting a reprieve. That was the feeling. … He brought in oxygen and gave us oxygen and tried to revive us and settle us down.”

He checked their pulses and calmed their nerves and said, “Oh, now boys, take it easy.”

Burden had to revive himself at one point during his three trips underground, “knocked unconscious” this time by the deadly gas instead of bombs.

“I rolled over down into sort of a little hole. … The air was good, came out of it,” he recalls.

“I just thought it was what was necessary,” he says of this and other perilous situations over other years. “So I did it.”

Melanson is glad he did.

“That was a long time ago, you know,” he says. “But it never left my mind.